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The Dismantling of Illusion

As a kid growing up in
church, I heard this story a lot. And
probably from some Sunday school book I have burned into my memory the image a ridiculous cartoon camel with bulgy eyes trying to stuff its head through the eye of a
huge, shiny sewing needle.

I remember one
particularly memorable sermon from my high school days where the pastor
explained that “the eye of the needle” was the name for one of the city gates
of Jerusalem that was so narrow, and low, that the traveler’s camels had to be
stripped of all their packs and baggage, and even sometimes kneel down on their
knobby knees to scootch through the opening – in a vivid illustration of both the
humility God demands, and the principal that you literally can’t take it with you.

So, the rich man was
putting too much stock in his stock, and needed to get humble before God would
accept him into heaven. Plausible, and
tidy. But then Jesus shifts the script
from this human conception of heavenly reward to God’s reality of the Kingdom
of God, and shocks the disciples by saying that not only is it especially hard
for the rich to enter into the kingdom of God, but actually under the terms
proposed, nobody would ever be good
enough. Only for God is success by that kind of method possible.

I always heard “the Kingdom of God” here as meaning the same thing as heaven, after we die. Eternal
salvation. Who will be in and who will be out. The everlasting acceptance of
God. But this misses the Kingdom of God as Jesus always talks about it – life with God
with us. The disciples make this same mistake. Still not getting it
that God’s economy is a place where deserving
is not even on the list of qualifications for entrance, like whining children
they rise to the ever popular and effective, “it’s not fair” argument, and
begin comparing themselves to the dejected rich man, telling Jesus all the
things they’ve walked away from in order to follow him. Surely, at least they are deserving of a place in the Kingdom
of God…

And Jesus, with
compassion and gentleness, answers that there is nobody who has left “house or
brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and
for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this
age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with
persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.”

We work really hard not
to need others and certainly not to need God. The worst thing on earth for some
of us would be to appear to need saving!
We’re not unlike the rich young ruler, coming to Jesus and saying, What must I do, oh good one?To be
guaranteed security for all eternity? To check off the boxes and know I’ve
arrived for good?

But Jesus, looking at
the man, loves him, and then answers just about the worst thing the poor
guy could hear, just about the only thing he wasn’t willing to do: Go and sell all you have and give the money
to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then follow me.

And the grieving man
turns and walks away, because what Jesus is asking him to do feels impossible.

But what Jesus is asking
for is the dismantling of illusion.

The illusion that your
wealth will save you, or your goodness – no one is good but God alone!- or your retirement fund, or how well you follow all God’s commands, or your
community service hours or fleetingly great health, or the admirable behavior of
your offspring, or any of the other thousand things we grasp at to be saved.

Jesus is asking us to
let go of all of that.

To see it all for what
it is – part of the experience of living, a source of joy and gratitude, or
grief and sadness, and often all of these things mixed up together, valuable,
yes, but also unable to make us real or whole or complete or alive.

But we don’t really mind
being half-dead. We stumble along with all our incredible baggage as though we
need it, and we’re missing out on the Kingdom of God right here, right now, being with Jesus as he is and where he is -
God with us – alongside neighbor, friend and stranger in the world with us. God
is the one who brings salvation. But wow do we have a hard time receiving. We’d so much rather earn!

I wrote an article last
week on Sabbath, around the same time someone was writing an article on Sabbath
about us. And it’s all kind of ridiculous. Because it’s not like we’ve cracked
the code or figured anything out. As a discipline, we're not so great at it. Many of us bumble through that day unsure
what to do with ourselves or why what we’re not-doing matters. Most of us can’t quite make it through a day
without at least accomplishing some
things to feel good about ourselves.

But it was made apparent
to me this week all over again what a powerful thing this actually is. See, God’s whole human project is about
connecting us with God and each other, and our whole sinful project is to cut
ourselves off from God and each other.

And when we go back to the Ten Commandments and look at the ways God
said that life works best, right between how we’re to be connected with
God and how we’re to be connected with each other we find this big strange
Sabbath command, that we’re used to just kind of skipping over, but which is a key to the whole thing, because it
basically says: You are going to keep disconnecting from me – the source
of your life –and from each other - your sisters and brothers in this life. Instead
of wholeness you will keep choosing brokenness, instead of life, you'll keep choosing death.

You can’t help it.

You are going to keep
thinking this is all about what you can earn or prove or buy or win, so you’ll keep
seeing each other as competition and threat and burden and obstruction.

That is the way of fear. The way of sin. The
way of slavery and death.

But the reality is you
are free. The reality is you already
belong to me.

The reality is I have
all you need; I am all you need. I am a God of abundance and joy and hope
and rest, and peace and enough.

And so, because you are
going to keep on forgetting this– here’s
my big suggestion to help you remember.
Ready? Every single week - I want you to stop.

Just stop.

For one whole day every
seven or so, step off the ride.

Stop measuring and
comparing and worrying and working.

Stop judging and
competing and producing and buying and trying to win.

Just. stop. All of you.

Rest.

Shut it down.

Come back to real life.

It’s enough. You are enough. I am enough for you.

I
am your God. You are my people.

This whole world belongs
to me and I am not letting go.

Remember that.

And I know that if you
stop, if you rest like I rest, if you celebrate like I celebrate,

if you wake up from your
angry and hectic stupor and raise your head and see the world, this beautiful
world, and if you look at each
other truly, without the screen in between you, and the to-do list in front of
you, and the wariness within you, and if, instead of the noise
of the pressing world and all its violent, vying agendas pounding in your ears,

you listen to the
silence, and the pause,

and the air, and birds,
and children, and heartbeat, and tears, and laughter, and dreams and sighing, you
will remember.

You wont be able to help
but remember.

You’ll breathe again.

You’ll come back into
the Kingdom of God, back to your home in me.

You’ll see again that I am right here. That life is a gift.

That instead of living
chronically fearful and anxious, there is so much to be thankful for and so
much to delight in.

You’ll care for each
other, and share with each other, and be again my people, and I will be your
God, because it’s how I’ve made it all to be in the first place, and how it
will all be again in the last.

This
is the reason for Sabbath.

It is one of God’s strategies for
helping us come back into the Kingdom of God – where we all belong to God, and
we all belong to each other, and we are not the ones holding the reigns, God
is.

When the rich man
sells all he has and gives the money to the poor- all that separates him from them will be
gone. It will be once again, humanity alongside one another in the economy of
God. And the barrier that keeps him from receiving love unlimited, and grace
unconditional, and from sharing it as well, will be dismantled, and he will be free, back into the Kingdom of God where we belong to God and each other.

And dear disciples, you who
have left so much to follow me, what if you have to put down your confidence in
the leaving itself, the way you measure your worth or progress or how saved you
may be by how much you’ve left behind and how well you're following?

Because truly, if you
were to open your eyes to the Kingdom of God right here among you, you would
receive and enter the whole huge picture, that we already belong to God, and you belong to every mother
and every father and sister and brother and there is, in fact, no such thing as other people’s children.

And it’s ironic that they
can’t see it in the moment, these followers of Jesus, who were every night
guests in someone else’s home, fed at different people’s tables, welcomed in
and treated as family in the economy of abundance and gratitude that Jesus
moved in perpetually as he lived out the Kingdom of God.

Jesus was always
connected completely to the Father. Always belonging completely to the world.
Always at home in God, always living in the settled state of trust. And they
could enter that too, at any moment, in fact, they were already there – God
with us was right there with them, and they were striving to be deserving of this at some
point in the distant future.

The last will be first
and the first will be last.

Those who don’t have all
these things to prop up around themselves to keep themselves safe, and
protected, and promote themselves forward, and buffer themselves from risk or
loss are closer to realizing the race is rigged and false to begin with. That the Kingdom of God can only be
entered and never earned. That salvation
is a reality we receive instead of a reward we deserve.

Jesus is heading toward
the cross. And not even death itself can
separate him from God or break the real reality that God has set in place. If anything, it simply clarifies what is real
and what is the game, which he resolutely refuses to play and persistently
exposes as fraud.

But us?

We choose
illusion and delusion most of the time.

Most of the time, we live like we have
the power to stop bad things from happening if we only, what, work hard enough? Pray hard enough? Have enough life insurance? Do enough good things in the world? Know the right
people? Have enough admiring things said about us?

What is it that makes us
feel secure?

In other words, What is it that keeps us from entering the Kingdom of God right here and now? Because whatever that is for each of us, that is the thing Jesus is inviting us
to let go of.

I think of the clarity
dying brings, when there is nothing we can hang onto any more as our security,
and the illusion of the game is punctured.

Bruce Kramer, who documented his
journey of dying in his book, We Know How
this Ends, says on his blog a couple of months before his death last March:

“The elegant hand of ALS holds great surprises. I never knew
that so much grace and peace and joy could be found in the inexorable
experience of dying slowly. Dis ease plunges me into a pool of beautiful
sadness. It focuses me so that each day, I awaken with profound gratitude for
my true loves, my one and only, our sons and daughters in love, our energetic,
remarkably bright and ever-growing granddaughter. I am overwhelmed by the
thankfulness I feel for friends, those who volunteer to care for me, those who
engage me in their day to day life challenges, those who share gifts of music
and poetry and yoga and life possibility.

Yet simultaneously, an undeniable
fatigue dogs me, washes over me, nips at my heels, impedes the energy I might
muster for the very things that so delight me. The daily life challenges I
experience – total dependency on others for the simplest of tasks, the
continuing breakdown of basic physical functions such as swallowing and
breathing and the like – exhaust me into sweet anticipation of the relief that
will come with my death. Death has become a good friend, a harbinger of the
final joy awaiting me, assisting me to shed the ALS revealed imperfections of
my physical body. The spiritual conflict is clear – I am utterly in love with
this ever deepening experience of living while at the exact same time I happily
anticipate the relief death will bring.”

Woe to the strong and
the mighty, the healthy and established and complete.

You have a camel’s
chance in a needle’s eye of letting all that go by choice to step into what’s
really real.

But no worries. Soon
enough the day will come when the illusion will be punctured for everyone, and real
reality will seep in. And everyone who
has left and lost things that were precious and important to them in the search
of God’s kingdom, will discover that in letting go they are opened up to
receiving all they’re losing and more – that the whole earth and everyone in it
is your family, and your home is forever in the love of Jesus who is right
here and now, alongside and with us.

And one day when this
struggle is over, and the delusions have shattered for good, and all the noise
and posturing has withered away to dust, all that will remain is life. Full and free. Enduring for
eternity – as it was meant to be: completely connected in unbroken love
forever to God and forever to each other in the Kingdom of God.

So watch, because those in this life who have been “last” will be the
first to welcome it in, and those we esteem as “first,” will be last ones to
realize what they’ve been missing all along.

Amen.

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